Tips & Insights for Top Performance

It’s all about choices. Which choice or strategy reflects your behavior around fear?
1) FEAR=Forget Everything And Run, or
2) FEAR=Face Everything And Recover (to get back; regain).

For something completely different, let’s try strategy number two. Your personal growth can be greatly stimulated when you ask yourself the following questions and then struggle to get the right answers. This process requires you to use critical thinking, creativity, open-mindedness and above all else, brutal honesty.

Considering the topic of what you want and what you fear, ask yourself these five questions that were posed by William Cottringer:

1. What can I really control?

2. How do I sabotage my own success?

3. What good things have I learned and know, and do I need to be applying them?

4. For whom (or what) am I doing all this?

5. What is the best I am capable of?

Having the courage to ask these five critical questions and then making the effort to find answers will open a large door ahead in your personal growth. Real growth then occurs when you become free to de-personalize it.

What we resist persists.

Consider your fears, face them and open yourself up to the possibilities!

Christy Geiger, Executive Business Coach & Trainer, Minneapolis, MN

I am excited to share with you this e-book, Ordinary People Can Achieve Their Lofty Goals. I am honored to be personally featured with some of the greatest minds of our day. This e-book compiles articles from over 50 leaders through tips, recommendations and strategies to help you succeed. The chapter I contributed is: “Five Steps to Accomplish Your Goals.”

Experts including, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, Chris Widener, Michael Angier, Tony Alessandra and 50 others from the top of the personal development field have contributed their encouragement to help you live the life you want and finally achieve your lofty goals.

Reader, Eric Garner comments, “I’ve just read ‘Ordinary People Can Achieve Their Lofty Goals’ for the 3rd time in 3 days. The first time, I only got to page 10 before I felt so inspired that I had to stop and finish off some work on some goals I’d let slip. The second time, I just couldn’t put the book down. I read and re-read the articles and learned so much. What an amazing collection. So profound and uplifting. The third time, I decided to cancel everything else and devote a couple of hours to the book and read them all through. It’s like a Masterclass in Motivation. My mood lifted so much, I felt so inspired at the end. It’s definitely going to be a book I’m going to come back to again and again. Brilliant concept, brilliant execution, brilliant results. Thanks.”

Get inspired and motivated and check out this e- book!

Christy Geiger, Executive Business Coach & Trainer, Minneapolis, MN

When things get hectic from trips, being sick, missed work days, special projects that take excessive work time; one of the first things to go is our routines, habits and the organization of our space and mind. Quickly we become overwhelmed or stuck as we try to make headway, feeling like we cannot move fast enough. At this point it is easy to get into the urgent and reactionary mode. Operating in urgent is usually the less effective way to manage our time and get things done as you are working hard all day, but just seem to answer phone calls, plow through e-mail and respond to things, but the to-do list stays the same or gets longer!

Here are 5 strategies to EMPOWER your productivity through Organization. This is organization of the mind.

1. Brain dump. What is on your mind? What needs to be done and how much time will it take? What can be delegated and what do you have to do?

2. Mind map. Push yourself to think beyond your brain dump, what else is there? You can write several columns with these headings or make circles with these in the middle and then list or make “lines” off your circles with what else might need to be considered: Look at work (marketing, business development, clients, staff, administration, finance, etc.), family, home/car, volunteer activities, meetings/events, friends/fun, money, health, and any others that have significant action items.

3. Park it. Use the concept of a “parking lot” to put things that are concepts or ideas, not urgent or important, and can be done later. Keep this as a post-it, task list or sheet of paper, as new things pop into your mind, you can jot them down to manage later. (These are non-task items)

4. Plan & Schedule. Mark the items that are very important or urgent and then plot out the next day or two of when you will do what and leave the rest of the list. Specify when you will do what so you can work through your list in a disciplined fashion. Plan blocks of time to manage phone calls, interruptions and other things that might get you off your schedule.

5. Book mark. Use a future to do list or a planning tool like Outlook to assign the other tasks that will be handled in a few days, next week, or in the future. This way you can get them out of your brain and know that you will not forget them. Our minds are like computers. The more windows and things open, the slower it runs. Likewise, the more things you try and hold in your mind, the slower you run.

Get everything out. Put it in the proper place (parking lot idea list, on a day schedule or bookmarked in a task list) and get going on the task at hand. Stay focused and do not divert. You will be amazed at how you make progress and how good you feel!

This is one of Steven Covey’s foundational books on how to be effective and productive. There are many great tips and strategies in this book. One of the most common is the 4 box grid which helps identify the important vs. urgent. In our society today it is almost impossible to NOT get swept up in the urgent, reacting to all the things that pop up around us and demand our time. If you do not deal with the important eventually everything becomes urgent and a crisis.

You have a choice every day. Will your day run you or will you run your day? Will you live in the urgent or important? The feelings of unproductivity, insanity and chaos occur when you constantly live in the urgent. To shift and balance urgent with important and actually RUN your day, you must have a clear handle on what is important and know how to handle the urgent things that come up so they do not derail you from accomplishing the important. Check out this book to master your skills.

It is very easy to get into the REACTIONARY circle of life! We deal with what comes up and are hard pressed to make progress on our to-do lists! Here are a few strategies on how to maximize your time, energy and effort through good planning, habits and personal perspective!

 PLANNING

1. Plan ahead.

•      Take:  10 minutes to plan your day
•                 ½ hour to plan for the week
•                 1 hour to plan for the month

  2.   Do the most important things first (with-in the first ½ of your day take 10 minutes to plan for the day)

• What do I need to do?
• How long it will take?
• What is most important? (prioritize)

Do the top 3 important things FIRST! You have heard the Rock story… if you fill your jar with pebbles, sand, gravel, water, and dirt first (distractions, routines, crisis’s, tasks), there is often not any room left for the big rocks (important priorities that often get cheated, ignored, procrastinated, and left undone because there is just not time).

  3.  Evaluate. We often spend 80% of our day doing things that are 20% effective and 20% of our day on things that are 80% effective. Look at what you are doing with your time. What are the essential things that make the biggest impact? Look to stream-line or eliminate the things that are least effective and spend more time on those things that are most productive.

 DEVELOP STRONG HABITS. Habits are a silent contributor to how we work. Often we do not see these as part of the equation because they are so natural to us. One way to increase your efficiency is to identify old habits that are not working and replace them with good habits that support what we want.

 1.    Identify Old Habits. Evaluate:

• What am I doing & why? (procrastinating, distracting myself, fire fighting, etc.)
• What is not working? (running from one thing to the next, getting frustrated, etc.) List 3 things you want to stop (reacting, procrastinating by cleaning, making excuses, etc). It is good to create a structure for what you will do if you catch yourself doing something you want to stop.
• What is working great? (AM to do list, listening to holiday music, writing my goal daily, etc.)